Part 3 of 3. Phone cameras and their part in history

The Phone Camera.

For all my life my father has worked in telecommunications so being up to date and well informed of new technologies is something that is almost second nature to me.

I was lucky enough to get a mobile phone with a camera in it very early on in their development, in fact I had the first generation that was available to the Australian market and it was amazing (for the time) but since then the technology has been advancing at an amazing rate.

The first commercially available cell phone with a camera in it was the J-SH04 made by Sharp electronics (released in Japan, November 2000) and it had a whopping 0.1 megapixel capability.

It took one month for it to be replaced by the J-SH05, this was a flip phone and the first “modern” style of phone with a compact shape, low weight and colour screen with 256 colours, wow!

Today’s technology has allowed the camera phone to be an extremely useful device, allowing the user to capture images in high definition and upload them instantly to Flickr, facebook, a personal website or simply email them to anyone in the world.

A father can send a photo to his parents overseas of his wife and newborn child moments after it’s born. A detective can maintain discreet observation over a suspect without the need for obvious surveillance equipment.

The sky is the limit as to the applications of this once oddball feature from high end phones way back when Y2K was so 1999.

But the technology does have it’s own limitations. At the end of it all you are buying a phone and you don’t want it to be too big and heavy to fit in your shirt pocket all at the expense of a larger optical sensor and the memory card to support large files, not to mention the decreased batter life.

In conclusion mobile phones with cameras in them are here to stay and I think that’s a good things because they are very useful. I’m massively impressed that my phone has an 8.1mp camera in it, yet is still lightweight, thin & stylish and has a high definition LED screen, oh and it also makes phone calls.

References:

¨     http://gsmserver.com/articles/cameraphone.php - Author unknown.

¨     http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/05/the-evolution-of-cell-phone-design-between-1983-2009/ - Author unknown.

¨     http://www.thefreelibrary.com/A+Short+History+of+the+Camera+Phone-a01073959413 - Author, Neo Nashville.